


Danny + Phantom

by Evidence



Series: Shelved WIP's [3]
Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fenton and Phantom as seperate entities, Gen, Possession, pairings yet to come, though the typical canon couples will probably at least wave hello at some point
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-29
Updated: 2014-05-29
Packaged: 2018-01-27 01:57:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1710770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Evidence/pseuds/Evidence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wherein Danny is less 'half ghost' than he is 'awkwardly possessed'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Danny + Phantom

 

The first time I saw him, I knew he wasn’t a ghost.

I don’t know how I knew that, since everyone I’d ever seen before _had_ been a ghost. But it was obvious. He was just… wrong. Like his shape wasn’t really part of the world around us, in the way that a typical ghost’s would be. It made me stop just from the shock of it, and I stared at him as he tumbled - with a spectacular flash of light - into the spinning green void of ectoplasm around us, and then drifted for a while.

He was leaking. Red, not green or blue, but it wasn’t like the red light of energy that burned from malevolent ghosts. It spilled out of the gashes across his body, places where the pale-brown skin had blackened and split. Dark and thick.

He looked like the aftermath of one of Skulker’s nastier hunts, apart from looking all _different_. His body was clad in black and white material that was burned and torn in places. His hair was dark, and very still; no flames or energy. Just many individual strands that drifted around his face, and got stuck in the smears of red across his forehead.

Seconds passed, and he floated in the space between spaces. I dared a little closer.

I wasn’t a strong ghost. Never had been. Not like some, who bore the memories and impressions of human lives, or others, who embodied great forces and powers. The first thing I remembered was forming in a vast expanse of ice and snow. Cold. I had drifted, for a time, before I first ran into some of the larger ghosts. Screaming across the white landscape, they made a sport of tormenting me. Eventually, ghosts of a different shape – with bright fur and icy horns – had appeared, and chased them off. But they paid me little mind afterwards. I was barely more than a whisper, a shade of green and blue, weak and small.

I left the ice, after a while. I didn’t want to stay, and risk encountering other ghosts again. But out in the expanse, there were only more of them waiting. When I realized that, I tried to find my way back to where I’d started, where I’d been formed, but by then, I was already lost. The best I could hope for from other ghosts was to be ignored, and I often was. Just as often, though, I was used – as a toy, as practice, as bait. I had learned to avoid as much of everything as I could. Only one day in any given year was safe, the Truce Day, but even then, I shied away from the big ghosts. Weaker ones, like me, sometimes clustered into groups or pairs for safety. But I had no luck in finding a group that would accept me.

Maybe that was why I felt so drawn to the outside-figure that had appeared before me. Up close, I could see that his chest was moving. Just a bit. It would expand, and then contract, as he made whistling-sucking noises with his mouth. I wondered if he was trying to eat some of the ectoplasm in the air around us.

That was probably a good idea, I decided. He didn’t look like he was healing in a hurry.

A flash of light close by caught my attention, and I reflexively dashed away, hiding in a nearby shadow. I turned myself invisible, and watched as one of the big ghosts made itself known. Dark, with sharp claws, and an amorphous green creature trailing in its wake.

Spectra. I had seen her in Walker’s prison, once, when there’d been a break-out and all the ghosts had escaped. Her helper had played cat-and-mouse with me for a while. I was the mouse. It hadn’t been fun, but then, games never were for me. The bigger ghosts seemed to enjoy them, though.

As I watched, Spectra drifted closer to the strange figure, and then clasped her hands together in delight.

“Well, well, would you look at this, Bertrand? Here we were, just talking about getting back into the swing of things, and fate practically _throws_ a teenager into our laps. Shame he looks a little worse for wear – but, beggars can’t be choosers!”

The green ghost took a form – a cat-like shape, which made me shudder – and grinned. His mouth curved like a crescent moon full of saw blades.

“Indeed,” he agreed.

“I don’t think he’s going to last long. Poor thing. Let’s put the last of his life’s energy to good use.”

Spectra reached for him, black claws and a sharp, white smile. Just when she might have touched him, though, another figure drifted out of a nearby doorway.

Blue and clad in purple, the ghost couldn’t have been that powerful; but he nevertheless launched himself into the void behind Spectra, and shouted at her.

“Beware!”

Spectra hissed, and Bertrand’s hackles went up. She swiped at the blue ghost.

“Idiot!” she snapped, her black claws tearing across him, trailing dark smoke in their wake. Her target dodged away, and began shouting out his name. He must have been one of the ghosts that had once been human. I knew that they were different from ones like me, though I didn’t understand all of it. But they were easy to recognize once you knew how to look for them. They tended to name themselves, and speak often, and they were usually more powerful. Not as powerful as the ghosts that embodied greater concepts, but I had only heard whispers about those. I never wanted to meet one. I didn’t know what it would be like to be completely torn apart, to un-exist, and I wasn’t in a hurry to find out.

Bertrand moved to bite the blue ghost’s head, and that was when a fourth ghost made itself known. I shrank further back into the shadows, suddenly wishing I was close enough to a doorway that I could just slip through. If they noticed me, there wouldn’t be much I could do to escape.

The fourth ghost was one I knew all too well. Skulker.

He liked to use me for target practice. I don’t know how he did it, but he had things ‘built.’ Like Technus, or Plasmius, too. Things that shot ectoplasm, and nets, and rockets, and other things that really hurt when they hit. Sometimes he locked me in a cage or stuck me on his wall. Most often he liked to use me as bait for bigger ghosts – that was how I generally got away from him, when he got so caught up in hunting _them_ that he stopped paying attention to where _I_ was.

Skulker looked at the floating body still spilling red into the void.

“A human?” he asked, surprised. “A human _child?_ How did this get here?”

Spectra hissed at him.

“Back off, hunter! I saw him first!”

“I am the B-”

“Shut _up_ you blathering idiot!”

I watched as affairs between the big ghosts degenerated into an argument, but didn’t really hear the words they were staying. My mind was stuck on what Skulker had said. A human? As in – a _live_ person? I had only ever heard rumours of such things. Stories told between other ghosts, and half overheard by me. Humans lived in the place beyond the ghost zone. They made ghosts, in a way, and some ghosts thought that they were human but weren’t. But a real human… I had never thought I would see one. And Skulker would probably know if that’s what it was. He seemed to know what nearly everything was.

The big ghosts kept arguing, and the human drifted, moving somewhat closer to my hiding space. Part of me was terrified of that. If he got close, and the others came looking for him, then they might find me, too. I didn’t want to go back onto Skulker’s wall, or into one of his cages. I didn’t want Bertrand to bite off any bits of me, and I definitely didn’t want to find out what Spectra’s claws would do to me.

But at the same time, I couldn’t bring myself to look away. Humans were special. They were… I didn’t really know what they were. But if they made strong ghosts, then they had to be strong themselves, right? Only this human looked like he’d lost a few too many fights. Maybe there were big humans and small humans, like with ghosts. Maybe he was a small human, and he’d been target practice for the big ones.

I felt conflicted. Part of me wanted to run, and part of me couldn’t help but know what the human was probably feeling. The weakness of it. I remembered how it had felt for me, when the first big ghosts had come and played their games with me as their target, and how relieved I had been when the horned ones in the ice had chased them off. How badly I had wished I could join them.

So, while the big ghosts fought, I dared to move a little bit closer to the human. And then a little bit closer again. And then I reached out to him. At first, my tendril went right through him. Like he was just made of empty vapour, even though, looking at him, he seemed more solid than anything else I had ever seen. On my second try, I concentrated on making myself firmer, and I managed to get one wisp of energy wrapped around his wrist. He didn’t react. So I watched the others instead, and made sure they were still busy with one another as I pulled him into the shadows, and then down, and away, into the nearest point of darkness, so black that we couldn’t be seen, before I felt bold enough to move faster. Then I wrapped a few more tendrils around him, and sped off as quickly as I could.

It was insane. I felt a strange thrill as I fled, knowing exactly how foolish it was. Even if the others didn’t come after us, Skulker would never let this go. But I had caught the human. _I_ had done it, not one of them, and as I pulled him through a nearby doorway, I decided right then and there that he was mine. My human. My first real claim to something in the endless struggle that was my existence.

We came out through the doorway into an area of the zone that spread like a vast, quiet desert. I knew the place. The ghosts there slept, waiting for their king – or so I had overheard. It was a good hiding spot, because no one guarded the zone, but it was too old and static for the bigger ghosts to just take over as well. The only other ones who ever really went there were small ghosts like me, looking to get away from something else. There were none of them around as I set the human down on the sand, and breathed out a puff of blue frost. My outside was much hotter than my core, and it took a few seconds to adjust.

The human was still broken.

I prodded him curiously, wondering how long it took humans to heal. Even the tiniest tears in his face and clothes had yet to close themselves. Maybe it worked differently for them? Ghosts used ectoplasm, but from what little I had heard of them, humans ran on ‘life’. Life energy was very rare and very precious. Some ghosts coveted it. I wondered if the human needed more exposure to it in order to heal himself.

That wasn’t an encouraging thought; I didn’t know how to get any.

Some of his red leaked onto the sand. I tried to straighten him out so that he wasn’t all clumped up. His skin hummed a little bit where I touched him. I supposed that was the life energy in him. It felt strange, but also good, warm and strong. Yet, as I waited, the hum seemed to get weaker and weaker.

 _Maybe… maybe the human knows how I can fix him,_ I thought. I shook him some, but that didn’t seem to wake him.

That left me with one choice.

Overshadowing was something the big ghosts did, to us small ones and to each other, and, supposedly, to humans as well. I had never done it myself. There had been no one weak enough for me to try it on. But for some reason, the hum in the human’s skin made it seem easier. Compelling, even. So I gave in to my instincts and slipped into his form.

It was like nothing else I had ever experienced.

There was _so much_. Warmth, and light, and dark, which I knew, but other things, which I had no comparison for. The way he felt things – warmth, and pain, and the way each tiny grain of sand clung to skin and settled beneath him. His clothes. How his eyes _saw_ the light and the dark. Part of it was like being trapped, in that it was all so structured and rigid and sharp. But mostly it was just amazing, as if I had never really _existed_ until that moment.

In a way, maybe I hadn’t.

I tried to make the human’s body move, but that caused pain like I had never known to scream through me. It was terrible. Worse than anything, but not enough to chase me out of his skin. Instead I lay still, feeling the body move on its own – something thudded in the chest, and some invisible substance kept flowing in through the mouth and nose to fill it up. I tried to encourage the body to heal, the way that I would encourage my own body to heal, but it didn’t want to cooperate.

Then I felt it. A _push_ , like another small ghost had sidled up alongside me and was pressing at my back.

 _Who’s there?_ I wondered, frightened that another ghost had somehow happened upon us and overshadowed the human without my noticing.

 _What’s going on?_ A voice thought back at me. It was… strange. Not like the other voices I’d heard. It felt rooted in the form around me, quiet and loud at the same time, like it had come from everywhere and inside me all at once. It took me a moment to realize what it probably was.

_Are you the human?_

The thudding in the chest got faster. The pushing feeling got a little bit stronger, but nowhere near strong enough to move me.

 _You’re a ghost,_ the voice thought. _Oh no, oh man, what’s happening to me? Where am I? This doesn’t look like the lab. Get out of me! Mom! Dad! Sam! Tucker!_

All at once a wave of pictures washed through me. I saw faces. Solid, strange faces, like the human’s, but different as well. Varied the way that ghosts were, though more subtly. I saw a realm filled with metal machines, like Skulker’s, and I saw something flash and burn and turn green before it exploded into a fiery ball of pain. So much pain. I flinched.

 _Ouch,_ I thought.

_Overshadowing me is an awful idea. My parents are ghost hunters. They’ll find out, and then they’ll dissect you, and you really don’t want that. Just let me go, okay? Please. Let me go._

Fear flooded through the body around me, but the pushing got weaker instead of stronger again.

 _No,_ the voice thought. _No, no, no… please…_

He was so frightened. I didn’t know what to do. The thudding in the chest got slower, and so did the mouthfuls of invisible energy. When the pushing almost went away altogether, I felt – I knew, somehow – that the body was losing the last of its life. That the human was going to fade away, the way that some of the unluckier ghosts did whenever they took too much damage to heal.

I had always been terrified of that. Of becoming nothing more than a puddle of energy, incapable of moving, or thinking, or feeling anymore. Being reduced to even less than I already was.

As the pushing left me, I chased it. I grabbed hold of it with the strongest tendrils I could, and kept it from sinking away. I tried to focus on making sure that the body didn’t turn into a puddle of goo, as I feared it would. It couldn’t. It was so amazing, what little I had glimpsed of this human, and I didn’t want it to be lost.

Maybe, if it couldn’t use its life energy anymore, it could take some of my ectoplasm instead. Maybe that would work. The idea scared me, because what if I gave too much? My ectoplasm _was_ me. It was all that I had. I hesitated. But I was losing my hold on that bright, pushing presence, and I knew that I would either have to do something or else give up.

Overshadowing the human’s body had felt easy. Natural. But what I tried next was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. It wasn’t like putting myself into the human so much as trying to drag myself out, but still take the human with me. My core got so cold that I burned instead, and I strained, pulling and tugging and sinking until I wasn’t even sure what I was doing anymore.

And all the while, I held on.

It hurt. It hurt so badly, like nothing else, and then it felt like I was being ripped apart, and I knew with sudden certainty that it wasn’t going to work.

It seemed I had destroyed myself and the human together, and I thought I was a fool. I should have run away, just like my first instinct had told me to. Why had I let some strange curiosity be my end?

But then something reached out, and instead of pushing away, I felt it grab me, too. Then all at once there was a _snap,_ and a burst of light before the whole universe turned to black. In that split second, caught between light and darkness, I felt somehow stronger than I ever had in all the years of my existence. There was an echo of that same sentiment all around me.

 _Wow,_ it said, before we both went still and silent.

I couldn’t say how long that lasted for. The time would have been impossible to mark in the endless desert anyway.

…

_…What happened?_

The voice sounded clearer, though it wavered a little, too. A limb moved – a hand, like the kind the human-shaped ghosts had – and it pressed tentatively against a chest. There was no pain.

_Wait, you’re still here? Oh man._

Eyes opened, and stared at the relentless white sun and blue sky overhead. It was so bright, and it was like I could _feel_ the light bearing down on me. Us. Him. On the human body we were both in. I felt a surge of wonder as the body moved, sitting up. Another hand joined the first one, patting at the clothes. I noticed that they’d changed. The parts that had been black were white, and the parts that had been white were black. The red stains were gone, and most of the rips and tears had finally closed.

_Okay, I don’t know who you are, but as much as I appreciate no longer looking like something off of my dad’s barbeque, you have **got** to get out of my head._

I wondered what a ‘dads barbeque’ was. Had that been what hurt the human?

_No, it’s – nevermind. Look, you seem like a, uh, nice ghost and everything, and I’m glad you’re letting me use my limbs and all, but seriously. Please. Get out of my head._

I’d been overshadowed by stronger ghosts before. It wasn’t pleasant, so even though I was reluctant to part with all of these new and amazing experiences – especially now that there wasn’t any pain to detract from them – I tried to do as the voice asked, and pull myself free again. I succeeded in extending myself slightly away from the body before the pain hit. Tearing. Burning. The only thing I could compare it to was one instance when Skulker had caught me unawares, and I’d realized what was going on just fast enough to try and go incorporeal when he threw one of his nets at me. I had succeeded halfway, and the net got stuck _in_ me instead.

It had been energized.

Needless to say, removing it had been a long and painful process of dismemberment and regeneration.

The body fell back, and the arms wrapped around it. The legs curled up.

_Ow, ow, ow, stop! Stop!_

I had already stopped and started to sink back in. The pain echoed, before fading away entirely.

_Did you do that on purpose!?_

_No,_ I replied. _I think I’m stuck._

Fear, cold and hard as the center of my core, ran through the human form again.

_Oh man. This is not good._

After a few moments of languishing in that fear, the body sat up again. One of the hands moved to its hair, and the eyes blinked as a pure white lock of hair fell in front of them.

 _What the heck…?_ _What did you do to me?!_

 _I don’t know,_ I admitted. _You were broken. I tried to fix you._

The fear got worse. After a few seconds, the body stumbled onto its feet. It didn’t fly. Instead it trod forward with heavy, firm steps that moved the sand beneath them, and turned. The eyes looked around. I marveled at the sights they saw – all things I had seen before, but never perceived in this way. The warm brown of distant pyramids, the soft outline of the clouds overhead. I wondered what other places and things looked like through these eyes. Was it always so amazing?

 _This isn’t amazing,_ the voice said. _This is horrible. Am I in **Egypt!?**_

_What is ‘Egypt’?_

_It’s a place. A place that’s really, really, **really** far away from where I’m supposed to be._

_We are through the door that leads to the realm of the Sleeping King,_ I told him. Then I quickly amended myself. _Not the Sleeping King of Ancient Fears, He Who Once Led the Armies of Infinite Death. The Sleeping King of Desert Sands, For Whom the Great Priests Await._

_…Gee, thanks, that really cleared things up._

I didn’t think his thanks were sincere, but as I had never heard thanks given sincerely, that wasn’t very noteworthy.

 _Okay, think, Danny,_ the voice said.

_What is a ‘Danny’?_

There was a pause, and I felt something strange. Like a tug, or a pull, but it wasn’t directed at me, and it couldn’t seem to decide which way it was supposed to go. After a few seconds, I recognized it as indecision. It was much less visceral than the fear and pain had been, so it was less obvious, too. I waited for the human to make whatever decision he was weighing.

 _I’m Danny,_ he finally said, once the feeling had passed. _That’s my name._

 _You must be stronger than I thought, if you have a name,_ I replied.

_Huh?_

_I thought you were a small human. But small things don’t get names._

Confusion slipped through me, a moment of simultaneous disconnect and unity. It was almost dizzying.

 _Hey! I’m due for a growth spurt any day now. Besides, everybody has a name,_ Danny asserted.

_No they don’t. I don’t. What is a ‘growth spurt’?_

Slowly, the confusion slipped away. It left the other feelings – mostly fear – to come back to the fore, but they were easier to take in. I wondered if all humans felt everything so vividly, or if Danny was a special case.

 _Didn’t you have a name when you were alive?_ He asked.

 _Oh!_ Comprehension dawned on me. _No, I was never a human. I’m not that powerful._ It was embarrassing to admit, and a little nerve-wracking, and as I felt those things, I wondered if he could feel them, too. Or if I should feel him feeling them, like an echo that just went on and on and on…

_But you’re a ghost?_

The confusion came back.

_I thought all ghosts used to be alive… maybe I should have actually paid attention to some of my parents’ lectures._

The head shook. The hand came up to press against the eyes, and Danny continued thinking.

_Okay, this is not important right now. What we need to do is get **you** out of **me** , and get **me** back home. How did I even get here?_

I recalled the moment I’d found him, seeping red and floating in the void beyond a swirling green vortex. From the sudden burst of apprehension that seized the body around me, I realized that he could see the memory, too. Because I was thinking about it? It was very interesting, even though it felt bad, so I kept going. I showed him how I stole him, and raced through the king’s door, and how I tried to keep him from fading away into nothing.

The body shook a little bit. A tiny tremor that seemed to press outwards from the chest, and spread through the whole of it, as if it had swallowed something that moved. But only for a second.

 _I almost died,_ Danny thought.

‘Died’. The ghosts that came from humans were said to have done that. To be dead, which meant that they had traded their life energy for ectoplasm, as far as I could see. I could still feel the life energy around us – it was very, very strong – but there was my ectoplasm, too.

 _Maybe you did, a little bit,_ I considered. A burst of awful emotion flooded up, and I instantly regretted it. It was a horrible cocktail of panic, fear, disgust, pain. The arms came up and squeezed around the middle of the body. The eyes closed, and left us in darkness. They opened again almost as quickly, as that only seemed to make the panic worse, and instead swept down the body, taking in the black clothes and white boots and sand beneath them.

 _No, no, no, this can’t be happening…_ _I’m not a ghost…_

I was at a loss for how to respond. The thought of being a ghost seemed to really disturb him. It had never seemed to bother the big ghosts, and I had never known anything different; but having felt some of what it was like to be human, I guessed it was much more powerful than being a ghost. Everything was… deeper, somehow. Better.

 _Get out of me! Get **out!**_ Danny insisted. The hands came up to clutch at the side of the head, pulling at the hair there until it hurt. Sharp little pinpricks of pain. _Out, out, out!_

 _I can’t,_ I told him, even as I reflexively tried to pull back from the anger in his voice. This was bad. He wasn’t a small human after all. He was a big, angry one, and he was mad that I’d corrupted some of his power. I couldn’t pull myself free. It still hurt when I tried, and the body fell to its knees, a cry escaping its mouth as it did.

But running wasn’t the only trick I knew. Hiding was always a good one, too, so even though I couldn’t go anywhere, I tried desperately to make myself disappear.

Almost as soon as I started, I could tell that something had gone wrong. Normally, making myself more intangible made me feel lighter. But this time, I felt heavier. As if I was forcibly pulling something else along with me. When the lightness came, it rushed in all of a sudden, and I jolted up in surprise.

The body came with me.

The head looked down, a wave of shock rushing in from all fronts as the eyes stared down at the transparent, barely-there distortion of space where the legs should have been. The sand was several feet below.

 _What… what are you doing?_ Danny asked.

 _I’m sorry,_ I immediately replied. _I was trying to go away._

There was a pause. Fear pulled at the shock, and something new did as well. Something big, and not entirely bad – maybe just a little bit excited instead. There was also a low, coiling feeling in the stomach that I had trouble deciphering. It felt like something was twisting in there.

_Are we flying?_

Gingerly, I tried to make myself more solid again. I hoped it would work both ways. After a long, difficult moment of dragging and pulling against what felt like an incredibly strong current, the weightlessness left with the same rush it had arrived in, and the body reappeared. Its chest rose and fell sharply.

It was still floating, but at the time, I didn’t see that as much of a problem. Floating was ordinary. It was everything else that was strange.

The arms and legs moved, kicking slightly in place and making strange motions.

 _What are you doing?_ I wondered.

The movement stopped. A dull ache replaced it, and the gulps of invisible energy became more rapid.

 _I can’t move anywhere!_ Danny replied.

 _Move…?_ I wondered. Tentatively, I pushed forward. The body obediently went forward a little ways, as if it were my own form that I was commanding. But it was harder. It didn’t really want to move this way; I had to make it.

Life energy, I concluded, was very heavy.

For a few seconds there was only the motion of the chest. Then I felt something _shift,_ and we were pressing forwards again, the arms and legs flailing a little once more. The motion stopped almost as soon as it started, replaced again by a heady mixture of fear and excitement. After another few seconds, it started up once more. The body drifted above the sands. I witnessed it with increasing detachment, feeling more and more exhausted as each second passed.

But the sense of elation from Danny began to increase as well, a thrumming excitement as the body moved faster, and faster, until we almost collided with the doorway to the sleeping king’s lair. Then it came up short, staring at the heavy frame and archway that was carved into the sky ahead. Awkwardly, the body pushed sideways, the limbs flailing a bit again for some reason. The head peered around to the back of the doorway, which, of course, looked identical to the front.

 _What’s this?_ Danny wondered.

 _…Doorway…_ I replied. It was taking a lot of energy to focus.

_Well, yeah, obviously. But what’s a doorway doing in the sky?_

I didn’t understand his question.

_Where else would it be?_

There was a brief, contemplative silence. I could still feel the fear, but it was less visceral by then.

_This is the way back into the Ghost Zone, isn’t it? I have to find that portal and get back home. Then Mom and Dad can… fix things._

Fixing things sounded good.

 _Okay,_ I replied.

_Hey, what’s wrong? Why are you so quiet all of a sudden?_

I tried to answer that, but I couldn’t quite work up the energy to. Everything was going distant and green, and I felt like if I wasn’t careful, I would slip away. My own fear struck up, and kept me holding on in silence.

_You’re still here, aren’t you? You’ve gotta be. Otherwise I wouldn’t be floating._

Danny waited for me to answer for a while. He prodded me a couple more times, but I didn’t dare risk it. Maybe I’d tried too hard to make myself disappear. Maybe I was, slowly but surely, actually succeeding – only not in a good way. I hoped he wouldn’t be too mad that I couldn’t answer him.

Finally, he gave up, and reached forward to grab the doorknob. He pulled it open. The long, dark, swirling void beyond was waiting for us. I shrank even more in apprehension at the sight. There were many dangerous ghosts out there. Ghosts that would be more than happy to speed along my descent into nothingness, and steal away Danny’s life energy for uses I couldn’t even guess at, but which _they_ had undoubtedly planned to the letter.

Danny felt fear, as well, but there was curiosity too.

 _Mom and Dad would kill to see this_.

There were those names again. I wondered what Mom and Dad were. The body passed through the doorway, and it slammed shut in its wake. The noise was too loud. I didn’t want us to linger. It was better to move with the currents, and keep to the dark, but Danny didn’t try to do that. Instead the head turned, looking around, taking in the distant doorways and shadowy outlines on the horizon.

_This is amazing!_

Slowly – far too slowly for my tastes – the body began to move. Straight forward, no darting around or hiding. Wisps of green extended vaguely from the black and white outline of our shared form, disappearing into the swirling ectoplasm. I wanted to draw strength from the wells of energy all around, but I didn’t even have the focus to manage that much. I barely had the focus to wonder where we were going.

Maybe Danny picked up on it, though, because the eyes began to look a little more carefully. Searching for something. The body drifted with more focus, and I caught bits and pieces of thought. The images that I myself had recalled when I remembered how I had brought him to the desert door. If I had been more coherent, I would have realized that he was trying to track his way back to the vortex where he’d first appeared.

The body was too obvious. It was only a matter of time before something noticed it.

I felt them watching us. All sorts of shapes and forms, but, mercifully, nothing too big. None of them dared too close. They skirted around in the shadows, as I would have, and kept a wary distance. Eyes glowed in the darkness.

Before I even realized what was happening, something struck the body from behind. Pain flapred across the back, and the mouth opened and let loose a cry of surprise. The arms and legs swung wildly through the ectoplasm around them as they were thrown forwards. Whatever had struck us had claws. Big, mean claws. Danny’s thoughts were lost in a maelstrom of confusion and alarm.

 _Run_ , I managed to tell him, though it felt like it cost me nearly everything to try. My ability to perceive the body’s sight went dark. For several long instances, all I could hear was the in-and-out from the body’s mouth, the thundering tempo beating in its chest, the pull of the world around it as Danny seemed to take my advice and pushed it hastily forward. I was slipping and falling into a sea of green. It didn’t matter how hard I tried to hold on. I couldn’t. I could only feel it as more pain struck the body.

Then, suddenly, there was weight. Weight and a flurry of other strange sensations I couldn’t identify. Voices called out. The body hit something hard and cold.

“-it closed! Now, Tucker!”

“I’m trying!”

“Oh my god, Danny, you’re-”

“Sam! Look out!”

There was a crash, a flash, and then I knew no more.

~

 

I drifted in unawareness for a long time. 

Then, slowly, the shadows peeled back. Sensation rushed into me, strong enough that I almost panicked. I was still in the body. Danny’s body, and my form now, too, I supposed, if they were still stuck together. The chest still went up and down. There was warmth all around, but it wasn’t terribly bright. Grey light spilled in from an opening in a nearby wall. Something thick and heavy was lying over us, and under us, and all around. Something faint, like a current of ectoplasm, drifted through the room. But I couldn’t see anything there, and I couldn’t feel an invisible presence, either.

In fact, I couldn’t feel _any_ presence. At all. That was the strangest thing, and the most frightening. I had always felt the presence of other ghosts, however distantly, and the constant hum of energy that ran throughout all the lairs and voids and endless expanses of the Ghost Zone. But suddenly, all of that was gone. There was only stillness, and quiet – even though it wasn’t really quiet at all. There were sounds. So many it was almost amazing. I could hear a slight whistling noise coming from the body itself, and, of course, the thudding in its chest. But there were also the distant thumps and whirs of strange things I didn’t know. Mostly coming from below, and from beyond the opening in the wall.

I hesitated.

 _Hello?_ I called.

There was no answer from Danny, except a vague jumble of muted feeling – exhaustion, mostly. For a few seconds I was afraid that he was slipping again, as he had been before. But it didn’t really feel that way. He was _there_ , he just wasn’t… there.

It was difficult to grasp. In fact, the entire situation had been difficult to grasp, so for the moment, I decided to stop trying. A tentative check revealed that I was still stuck inside his human form, though I managed not to pull so hard that it hurt that time. Just enough to find that there was resistance. After a few minutes of staring only straight ahead, I worked up the nerve to try and move the eyes. They obeyed my commands, though they couldn’t seem to turn very far. Next, I tried the head, to pretty much the same results.

The room looked like it could have been a ghost’s lair, but there was something very different to it as well. There was a solidity that made it seem much more permanent. A sort of sense of finality that was difficult for me to place. As the body kept sucking in its invisible energy – and really, what _was_ that? – I realized I could taste it. Sort of. It seemed very crisp and clean. I liked it.

 _Life energy,_ I thought.

But if the body was getting life energy now, and there was no life in the Ghost Zone, then that meant…

That meant…

I froze up, caught between a mixture of excitement and fear. Could it be? Had I gotten _out_ of the Ghost Zone? Was I really in the space beyond? The human world?

I tried to move forward. There was a lurch in the stomach, and the back arched, but otherwise, both myself and it stayed where we were. I puzzled over the failure for a moment, and then tried to fly up instead forward. A tingling sensation ran through me, heightened by the body’s aches, and I became aware of a fading pain across the back and along the top of one arm. My failure frightened me even as my exhaustion doubled. Why couldn’t I move? I’d been able to do it before.

_I can’t move anywhere!_

That was what Danny had thought, after I had accidentally succeeded in getting the body up off the ground. He’d been flailing the arms and legs around before then. I wondered if that was how things worked in – in this place. Some of the big ghosts really did like moving their limbs around a lot, even when there was no apparent reason for it.

I moved one leg. It lifted up, and then came down. Encouraged, I did the same with the other, and then moved the arms around some. It was very tiring, but after a few moments, I seemed to have some success; the platform the body was resting on tilted, and movement happened. I felt a sudden lurching rush before I crashed into something solid, and slightly fuzzy.

The impact hurt.

Something sparked inside my mind, like a flare of energy, and I felt a sense of otherness wash over me.

_Wha…?_

_Danny!_ I thought back, strangely relieved and excited.

The body groaned, and moved. The arms pressed against the floor to push it up. I paid attention, noting the way the knees bent, how every little movement seemed to act against a strange, steady _pull_ from below so as to allow it to navigate the space it was in. Like a tiny struggle. I supposed it made sense; if life energy really was so heavy, then it must be even heavier in a place without currents of ectoplasm to buoy it.

 _You’re still here,_ Danny seemed to state and ask at the same time. A hand came up to move some strands of hair out of the eyes. It was black again, I noticed.

 _Yes,_ I replied. _What happened? Where are we?_

 _I guess the ‘dazed and confused’ shoe is on the other foot now,_ Danny thought. It sounded like gibberish to me.

 _I do not understand._ _What does this have to do with shoes?_

Nervousness and amusement warred for dominance in the emotions I could feel. The body rested its back against the side of the structure it had been lying on. Pain flared up anew as it came in contact with the solid form, and it pulled back again. Danny hissed.

 _What was that thing, anyway? The one that attacked us?_ he wondered.

 _A big ghost,_ I replied.

 _Yeah, I got that part._ _I mean… I guess I don’t even know what I mean._ The head moved so it was resting against the hands. The top lip of the mouth sucked the bottom one in, and clenched it gently between the teeth. I felt tension radiating everywhere.

 _We’re at my house,_ Danny finally told me. _After you… um, passed out I guess, I managed to get us through the portal. The ghost chased me, but Tu – uh, someone turned it off before it got all the way through. It looked like it hurt._

I had no idea what it would be like to get caught inside of a portal while it was collapsing, but I guessed that it would.

 _Anyway, I turned back to normal then. I kind of thought you’d maybe been sucked back into the Ghost Zone or something._ There was a pause while we both seemed to digest his anxiety. Then he added, almost tentatively:

_I didn’t tell my parents about you._

I wasn’t sure what that meant, either.

 _What are ‘parents’?_ I asked.

The body shifted, and the energy it let escape from its mouth was heavier than usual. That seemed to ease some of the tension along with it, I noticed, fascinated.

_You know. The people who give birth to you? I guess you don’t have those, if you were never born. But – um, they’re the people who made me, basically. And look after me._

_Oh, I understand!_ I replied, happy that I did. During the past while, I seemed to have understood very little. _They are the two who merged to create you out of their better traits. Some ghosts do that._ Usually they only did it when they were desperate, though, because the ghosts they made were always stronger than the ‘parents’ had been. No ghost I knew would happily create something stronger than them, something that would inevitably compete with them for dominion one day, without a very good reason.

 _I guess that’s mostly right,_ Danny said. _Although it’s not really… I mean, I don’t think the technical aspects are… um… anyway, I wouldn’t say I’m made out of their ‘better’ traits, my parents are kind of insane geniuses and I’m not a genius and hopefully not insane… or at least I didn’t used to be…_

The head shook. Danny seemed to catch his own streaming thoughts and wrestle with them for a second.

 _Nope, I am totally not having The Talk with the freaking **ghost in my head** ,_ he decided.

_What is The Talk?_

_Not answering that,_ Danny told me. _It’s not really important, anyway. So… I guess we’re still… stuck?_

 _Yes,_ I confirmed. A tremor of suspicion made itself known.

 _Listen,_ Danny thought. _My parents are ghost hunters. And not that I’ve really bothered to pay attention to what they do for a long time, but they’ve told me a lot about ghosts. It’s practically all they talk about. They’re good people, and, like I said, geniuses, so I know they’re not lying when they tell me that ghosts are dangerous. And tricky. And really good at fooling people._

I thought about that, and decided it was mostly true. Except for the ghosts who ignored me, I had only ever met ones that tried to harm me. Sometimes they pretended to be friendly first. Mostly, though, they didn’t bother.

Danny kept going.

_There’s no such thing as a good ghost._

_…Oh,_ I replied.

_So if this is an act, you can just drop it now. It’s not going to work. Whatever you’re hoping to get out of this – as soon as you hurt me or try to make me do something I don’t want to – I’ll march right up to my parents and tell them about you._

His parents. The ghost hunters.

 _What would they do?_ I wondered.

The shoulders shrugged.

 _You don’t want to know,_ Danny told me.

 _But I do! I just asked!_ I replied.

_No, I mean, it would be so bad that if you knew about it, it would give you nightmares._

_How many?_

_…What? Okay, no, nevermind. I guess they’d probably take you apart or something. Figure out how you worked by ripping out all of your pieces and experimenting on them._

Terror filled me at that prospect. It was made worse by the fact that I didn’t really know what to do. I couldn’t go anywhere. I was still trapped, and apparently I was at the mercy of humans who specialized in destroying ghosts in needlessly complex and painful ways. Just like a lot of ghosts I knew did.

As enthralling as it was, my situation was looking worse and worse by the minute. Even more frightening, I had no idea what I might do that would ‘hurt’ Danny, or make him do something he didn’t want to. Did moving the arms and legs before count as making him do something he didn’t want to? It was his body, after all. But it was also my form – or tied to my form. And if I tried to get away, that would _definitely_ hurt him. Me, too.

I was subject entirely to the whims of a human, all because I’d been too interested for my own good.

 _I – I won’t do anything,_ I promised.

There was a pause, and a twinge of emotion which I couldn’t quite place. Again, the body shifted.

 _…Sorry,_ Danny thought at me, to my surprise. _I didn’t mean to scare you. I just – this is really weird for me. Humans aren’t supposed to have more than one person in their head._

 _I’m not used to it either,_ I admitted.

The body lifted up, standing on the legs – on _his_ legs. He walked back over to the platform he’d been lying on before. It was covered in soft-looking things. I couldn’t make a lot of sense of it, but then he lay back down on it, and his aches eased somewhat. It was warmer and more comfortable there. Danny was soothed just by the act of stretching out on it.

 _I’m tired,_ he informed me. I already knew; I could feel it. _Let’s get some sleep, if we can, and then we’ll talk about it in the morning._

I felt a trill of fear.

 _Sleep?_ I wondered. _Why would we sleep?_ I thought of ancient tombs and old, forbidden places, and the kings who were sealed off, one by one, left to linger between oblivion and consciousness until they either awoke, or time itself came to an end.

 _…To rest?_ Danny thought, nothing but confused by my response. _I guess ghosts don’t do that much. Humans usually go to sleep every night, and wake up the next morning. We need to._

 _When is morning?_ I wondered, though a million other questions were warring for dominance in my mind. More slipped through. _Humans sleep at will? Do they wake at will? Is it impossible to bind humans in the forever-sleep, because they’d just wake up? Why sleep at all? How does it help them rest? Was that what you were doing earlier, when you wouldn’t answer me? Sleeping?_

And, perhaps the most strange notion: _was that what **I** was doing earlier?_

Danny flung one arm over his eyes. Everything went dark.

 _I am never going to get to sleep if you keep asking me questions,_ he thought.

I was reminded again how bad of an idea it was to annoy him, and so I retreated some, pulling back on my curiosity in favour of caution.

_I’m sorry._

_You’re kind of… not very scary, considering you’re a ghost that’s halfway taken over my body,_ Danny told me. _I’ll answer your questions, but then that’s it, okay?_

 _Okay,_ I immediately agreed.

_Morning’s a few hours away. Probably less than I’d like, actually. Humans sleep when we’re tired. We can keep ourselves awake, but it gets harder the longer we try to. Loud noises or sudden movements can wake us up – otherwise, we pretty much wake up when we’re not tired anymore. I don’t know what the forever-sleep is, but it doesn’t sound good, so I hope we **are** immune to it. We sleep because we have to, and it helps us rest because… I dunno. That’s just the way it works. Yes, I was sleeping earlier, and no, I don’t know if that’s what you were doing or not. But I guess it sort of fits._

His answers were mostly satisfactory, although I found I was still curious. Nevertheless, I honoured my part of our bargain, and kept quiet as Danny tried to sleep. I tried to observe what was happening, so I would recognize it, or maybe figure out how it worked. I’m sure that some of what I was thinking and feeling got through, because I caught flickers of his annoyance and apprehension, and some monolithic worry and sense that _‘this kind of stuff just isn’t supposed to happen’_ , but I ignored them as best I could. After a while, it got a little easier.

I wondered if I was maybe coming free a little bit. I hoped so.

Eventually, Danny again grew still and silent in the way he had been before. It was a gradual descent, like the darkening swirl of a vortex closing. I didn’t try to move again after it happened. I lay there, and let the eyes stay closed, and focused on all of the little sensations I could still feel. Even so, it eventually got very boring. I’d never been so _static_ before. By the time something began to make a truly awful sound from nearby, I thought I was going to go mad.

Danny sparked back into wakefulness.

 _You are finished sleeping!_ I thought, with a visceral mixture of relief and just a touch of awe.

 _Mrrrg,_ Danny thought back at me, before moving himself over to one side and slamming one of his hands down on top of a nearby mechanical device. The noise stopped.

Danny sat bolt upright, sucking in a mouthful of energy and making a strange noise as he did. He looked at both of his hands, and then tugged at one of his locks of hair, yanking it down so that he could stare at it. It hurt a little bit, but for some reason, he felt relieved.

_Oh man, it was really real, wasn’t it?_

_…Yes?_ I ventured tentatively, not sure what he was referring to.

“This sucks,” he muttered, his voice echoing, and it took me a second to realize that he’d spoken out loud.

What followed proved to be one of the most interesting experiences of my existence so far. Danny stood up, and proceeded to ‘get ready for the day’ because he ‘had to’. The first thing he did was procure clothing for himself. The clothes were real items, like the kind that only big ghosts sometimes had, and not anything formed by his own energy. Apparently, life energy couldn’t form constructs at all. I wasn’t sure how that worked, but Danny ‘changed’, keeping his eyes closed the entire time. It felt very strange. When he opened them, it was apparently to find that the shirt was on ‘inside-out’, and he had to take it off and start over again. There was a pressure coming from his middle that needed to be relieved, and he couldn’t close his eyes for that, but he made me promise not to watch. I decided not to tell him that I saw whatever he did whether I wanted to or not, and just forced myself to pay as little attention as I could to the depositing of the strange yellow fluid into the white basin.

I couldn’t see what was so important about it that I wasn’t allowed to know, but in the end, it seemed like a better idea not to ask. That was followed up by ‘brushing’ the teeth, which was not a pleasant experience. Danny procured a strange, bristly item, and put a sort of ectoplasm-like goo on top. Only it didn’t hum like ectoplasm, and when he put it in his mouth, it tingled and burned. The ‘mouth wash’ he followed it up with was even worse. When I asked why he was harming himself, he told me he was ‘cleaning’.

When I asked what ‘cleaning’ was, his face scrunched up in an odd expression, and his skin crawled. He told me he had a sudden urge to ‘take a shower’ – I had no idea where or why – but in the end, he decided against it. Instead he went downstairs. The lair around us was much like the room, but also like the Ghost Zone, in that it had many doorways. They didn’t float freely, however. Everywhere we went, it seemed, there was something below Danny’s feet and above Danny’s head. It made me feel even more confined.

I was thoroughly distracted by the event of ‘breakfast’, however.

Danny walked into a wide room with several interesting structures in it. Most interesting of all, however, were the humans. Even without knowing where I was, I think I would have recognized them immediately, in the same way that I’d known Danny was different right away.

There were three of them. One of them was absolutely huge; bigger than some of the big ghosts I’d known, and I was instantly afraid of him. The other two were smaller, with red-coloured hair that lay flat and still like Danny’s. One of them was barely bigger than Danny himself, and both of them looked female.

Danny identified the big one as ‘Dad’ and the mid-sized one as ‘Mom’, and the smaller one as ‘Jazz’. Apparently, Danny’s parents had merged on more than one occasion, and had made two offspring. Jazz had been the first, but I supposed that she had been defective, and so they had tried again and produced Danny. None of them fought, or tried to chase Danny away as he moved into their midst.

Mom looked at Danny and smiled.

“How are you feeling, sweetheart?” she asked. “Still bruised from the accident?”

Danny moved his shoulders up and down.

“A little,” he replied, his nervousness running between us like an electrical current. It was only amplified by my own. These were the ghost hunters.

“You need to be more careful down there,” Mom said.

Dad laughed.

“Dann-o’s going to be a natural,” he exclaimed. “He even got the ghost portal working, and he’s fine! Give him a break, Mads.”

Jazz made an angry-sounding noise. I fought the reflexive urge to shrink back from it, and wondered how dangerous she was.

 _“Dad!”_ she snapped. Dad winced, which alarmed me; big though he was, I guessed from his reaction that he wasn’t the most powerful human in the lair. “Danny’s just been through a traumatic experience! You shouldn’t minimize it like that. Enduring physical and psychological damage at the hands of some of your crazy inventions could scar him for life!”

Danny hunched his shoulders and lowered his head a little. I got the impression that he was trying to make himself much smaller. Right then and there, I concluded that Jazz was probably the most dangerous human. After all, something didn’t always have to be ‘big’ to be _big._

“I’m fine, Jazz,” Danny said. Jazz rounded on him, and we both wished fervently that he hadn’t said anything at all.

“No, Danny, Mom’s right,” she insisted. “You need to be more careful. In fact, you probably shouldn’t even be down there at all! It isn’t safe.”

Mom made a ‘tsk’ sound.

“Of course it’s safe, honey,” she said, displaying more confidence than either Dad or Danny. I reassessed the power dynamics – maybe _she_ was the most dangerous. Or, most likely, it was a draw.

“How can you say that? Danny was just caught in an explosion!” Jazz objected, throwing her hands up into the air. I almost expected her to start glowing with angry red energy, but she didn’t.

“There’s no need to be overdramatic,” Mom replied. “Danny’s learned his lesson, and he knows better than to fiddle with any power switches again.”

“Boy do I ever,” Danny murmured.

 _What are ‘power switches’?_ I wondered.

 _Later,_ Danny replied.

Then he took an implement off of the surface in front of him, and inserted it into a strange mound of something soft and yellow-ish nearby, and brought it up to his mouth.

It was _much_ better than the toothpaste or the mouthwash. In fact, it was amazing. I had never eaten anything before. The closest I’d come to it was being eaten myself, or maybe absorbing ectoplasm, but those experiences couldn’t really compare. This was like the first bit of life energy I’d tasted the night before, only a hundred times stronger. It was warm, and smooth, and it made Danny’s mouth hum as it seemed to take in everything about it.

 _What is this?_ I wondered, enthralled, and Danny loosed a sound of delight as he moved the yellow mush from his mouth down his throat. I couldn’t feel it anymore after that.

The other humans gave him a strange look.

He forced some energy from his throat, and then picked up a weird, somewhat transparent object full of orange liquid.

“Uh… these are good eggs, Mom,” he said.

Jazz and Dad gave their plates odd looks. Mom smiled very brightly.

“Thank you, sweetie,” she said, and then lifted up a vessel full of more soft yellow stuff, and transferred another heap of it to the platter in front of Danny. I was delighted. Even if Mom was the most dangerous human who had ever lived, I would brave it as long as I could keep experiencing the strange, wonderful sensation of eating through a human mouth.

Fortunately, Danny seemed to find my enjoyment more amusing than anything, and ate until his stomach felt slightly heavy. That made sense, I supposed, if all of the yellow mush had gone there.

 _They’re scrambled eggs,_ he told me, as he grabbed a strange sack from beside the biggest door in the lair.

 _I like them,_ I replied.

_No, really? I never would have guessed._

Before I could reply, he reached out and opened the door. I braced myself.

But beyond the lair, there was just more… lair.

A blue sky stretched overhead, broken up by fluffy white clouds and a bright yellow sun. I had seen a lot of lairs with similar skies, though never ones that seemed quite so distant. There were other things that I recognized from the lairs of other ghosts. Trees, buildings, even roads and the large, mechanical beasts that trundled down them. Nothing was floating. Everything seemed weighted to the ground. And there were more humans.

There were several of them all over the place. Moving, talking, heading steadily forward along their winding paths. None of them were fighting. None of them were shouting. Some went by one another without so much as a backward glance. It was _busy,_ but it was also _peaceful._ The closest thing I could liken it to was Truce Day, when no one was allowed to fight. I wondered if humans had something similar.

 _Yeah, fighting is generally frowned upon here,_ Danny told me.

I wondered, then, what human was big enough and powerful enough that the others would be afraid of its _frown._

_It’s… nevermind._

Danny walked, and explained to me that the energy he was sucking was called ‘air’ (and the act ‘breathing’). It tasted sweet, but also different from how it had when I noticed it before. The backpack he was wearing was uncomfortable, as it pressed against his still-healing injuries, and despite what he had said about the values of sleeping, he still felt tired.

The path he walked along wasn’t incredibly big, compared to some I’d seen, but it was incredibly _diverse._ Everywhere Danny looked, I saw little inconsistencies and changes. Any two given buildings almost never looked the same, and they only got more different the further he went. There were details everywhere. Texture and colour on everything. Little bits of static green that jutted up through the grey stone ground, and tiny, broken pieces of rock that Danny kicked with his steps, and even tinier, crawly things that disappeared into dark cracks or scuttled away. Machines roared as they raced by. Flying creatures landed on the strings that had been spun above the paths, and called out to one another.

If the human realm was small, it made up for it by being very, very full.

Eventually, we came to a building that was bigger than most, and sitting amidst an open field of green. I recognized that there were letters on the front, although I didn’t know how to read them.

 _Welcome to Casper High,_ Danny told me.

 _Why are we here?_ I wondered.

_Well, if you ask Mr. Lancer, it’s so I can learn how to become an educated and responsible member of society. But mostly it’s because the government says so._

_What is ‘the government’?_

_…You know, just once I think I’d like to think of something without you asked ‘what is blank?’ immediately afterwards._

Quietly, I decided that Government was probably the big human that everyone else was afraid of. That fit. Before Danny could think anything else, a pair of humans approached. They were small, like him, and both dark in different ways. One – the male – was wearing a red hat, which probably meant he wasn’t to be trifled with. The other, who was female, was clad in a lot of black. If it wasn’t for the natural solidity of her life energy, I wouldn’t have been too surprised to see something like her in the Ghost Zone. It took me aback, seeing someone who looked relatively normal but who was still so fundamentally different.

“Danny!” the female exclaimed, raising an arm in greeting. I braced myself, forgetting what Danny had said, instinctively expecting some kind of attack.

 _Relax, these are my friends, Sam and Tucker,_ Danny told me.

 _What are…_ I began to ask, before I caught myself, and bit it back. No. I could figure it out on my own, without annoying Danny.

When ‘Sam-and-Tucker’ got close, they started moving alongside Danny. I noticed that the other relatively small humans seemed to cluster together in a similar fashion. Sort of like how some ghosts would form temporary alliances whenever anything big was happening in the Ghost Zone, if it increased their odds of getting what they wanted. Or just surviving. As the three humans started talking, I wondered which one was Sam and which one was Tucker. Or if they were just one human that sometimes split itself into two parts.

“Are you okay? You didn’t – you know, go back to the weird…?” the female asked, moving her hand vaguely in front of her hair and eyes.

“Uh… w-well…” Danny stuttered.

“Oh man, did your parents find out?” the male Sam-and-Tucker wondered.

“Do they know what happened to you?” the female one pressed. “I mean, that was _not normal,_ Danny. You looked like a ghost _._ ”

Danny frowned.

“Gee, thanks, Sam. I’m so glad you reminded me,” he replied, answering my unasked question at the same time. If the female was called Sam, then the male was probably Tucker.

Which just left the question about what a ‘friend’ was. I puzzled over it, paying less attention to the conversation between the humans. Sam and Tucker were Danny’s ‘friends’. They weren’t attacking him, but they seemed to have sought him out anyway, and they were talking with him. Maybe they were a type of ally? Or they served the same bigger human? Suddenly, I wanted to ask Danny if he served anyone – I never had, apart from being Skulker’s bait – but I kept to my resolution not to ask so many questions.

Letting my curiosity overwhelm my sense of self-preservation was what had gotten me into such a mess to begin with.

“I’m fine,” Danny snapped, his tone and apprehension drawing my attention back to the conversation. “Would you guys just lay off for a little while? I know it was really weird, but it’s over now.”

Sam and Tucker looked at one another. Then Sam frowned.

“Excuse us for being worried,” she said, before turning around and stalking off further inside of the lair we’d entered. Danny watched her disappear down a long corridor lined with many tiny, locked doors.

“I still think you should tell your parents what really happened,” Tucker said. “But I’ll let it go.”

Danny ran a hand through his hair.

“Thanks, Tuck,” he said. “Guess I should go apologize…”

Something horrifically loud and unpleasant resounded through the air. I recoiled, and Danny’s body flinched.

“…After class.”

Danny moved towards one of the nearby little doorways, and put his hands on the lock. It felt alternately smooth and rough between his fingers as he turned it, and he counted some numbers loudly enough in his thoughts that I could hear them. Then he took off his bag, pulled out something thin and hard, and shoved the rest of it inside. He closed the door and locked it again, leaving his bag behind to float – or sit, rather – in its own little grey lair.

His feet made funny squeaking noises as he moved down the corridor, going a little faster than usual, and then opened a nearby doorway. The lair beyond wasn’t tiny and grey. It was big, with many square openings along one side, and lots and lots of humans in it. They were all sitting in chairs that were attached to little platforms. The biggest one was standing at the front of the lair. I observed him nervously. Danny hunched his shoulders, and made his way over to one of the empty chairs.

I wanted, desperately, to ask what was going on, but I held back. Tucker had followed after us, though I only realized that when I saw him sit down nearby. Sam was nowhere to be seen. I wondered what had made them split up.

 _I hope you’re happy. I’m keeping secrets from my friends because of you,_ Danny thought, drawing me out of my observations again.

My first reaction was puzzlement. Couldn’t he feel what I was feeling? He should know I wasn’t happy.

 _Can’t you tell?_ I asked. Immediately, I regretted it. That was a question, and I hadn’t meant to ask, and I already knew that Danny was annoyed.

 _Maybe. You could be faking it,_ he insisted.

 _I’m not,_ I replied, at something of a loss.

The big human at the front of the room began to speak, then. He wasn’t nearly as scary-looking as Dad had been, but he was still fairly intimidating. His head was bald, and his belly was big and covered by a blue shirt. Blue wasn’t a very troubling colour, though, so I decided that he would probably be pretty easy to escape from in a hurry. He was talking avidly about something, and holding a book in one hand. I hadn’t ever seen very many books. Human ones looked different in the same way that human-everything seemed to look different.

“I want everyone to turn to page forty-five, and… oh, let’s see… Mr _. Foley_ , you can start us off by reading the first paragraph,” the big human declared. Tucker glanced at Danny, and then stood up. I was confused; wasn’t he called Tucker? Where was ‘Mister Foley’? But then he began to read, and I forgot all about that.

Reading. It had always amazed me how some ghosts could see little squiggles or signs and know that they meant something complex or important. Watching Tucker, I realized that he was turning the same letters that Danny’s eyes were looking at into the words he was saying out loud.

I focused, trying to see if I could figure out how to do it. But there were too many squiggles and too many meanings, and Tucker talked too fast. I got lost pretty quickly. Danny seemed to know exactly what the symbols meant, so much so that he wasn’t really focused on them at all. Instead I only gathered hints of his distant thoughts and impressions from him, as he rested his head against one of his hands.

After Tucker finished reading, the big human began talking about what the words had meant. They were part of a story, apparently, about a human who had lived alone on an island. I wasn’t sure why the human or the island were important. Maybe the island was a lair they planned on attacking? But it didn’t seem like the big human was planning anything. Instead he was talking about things like emotion and solitude. Then he stopped for a while and turned around, and wrote something on the wall behind himself.

I recognized the order of some of the letters as matching the book in front of Danny.

The next few moments were much the same, and though I didn’t understand it, I enjoyed it. When the loud, clashing sound rang through the air again, Danny picked up his books from the platform in front of him, and made his way back into the corridor. He looked around, searching for something, but after a minute he just headed off towards another one of the doorways with Tucker.

There was another room, a lot like the first, with a big human and a bunch of smaller ones. Danny took a seat again, and that time the big human talked about numbers instead of words. Danny seemed even more disinterested than before. But _I_ was enthralled. Some of the symbols seemed impossible to understand, but there were fewer to decipher, and when the teacher wrote on the wall and spoke, I began to put bits and pieces together. I noted which letter was a ‘one’ and which was a ‘four’, and even though I’d never seen the symbols, I _did_ know how to count. Counting was important for keeping track of enemies that split themselves into multiples. Most of it I had actually learned in the prison, where everything seemed to happen by numbers and rules.

Still, it was very confusing as well. I just couldn’t understand what it was all _for_.

Partway through the experience of the second room, something collided with the back of Danny’s head. He reached a hand up to his hair, and something fell down into the collar of his shirt before bouncing off onto the floor. Turning around, he glared at another human who was sitting behind us. He was bigger than Danny, but his projectile assault had been very weak, so I promptly underestimated him, even though his jacket was bright red. Danny picked the item up. It was a piece of paper.

“Eyes forward, Mr. Fenton,” the big human said, stopping right beside him. Then she reached out a hand, a look of deep annoyance etched onto her face. Danny and I both cringed. One of her eyebrows went up. “Passing notes again?” she asked. “I’ll see you and Mr. Baxter in detention.”

 _Oh, man,_ Danny thought, while the human behind him made a strange noise.

“Detention? But I have practice!” he protested.

The big human sighed.

“Then you can serve your detention tomorrow, Mr. Baxter,” she replied. “Mr. Fenton, since you’re the one who started all this, maybe you’d like to come up and solve the equation on the board?”

Cold, hard dread flooded through Danny. He stood up with great reluctance, and I braced myself, suddenly hyper-alert for danger. It wasn’t natural to be around so many others and have nothing violent happen for so long. I was almost relieved that the moment had finally arrived – almost. Except I wasn’t sure what I could do about it in the human world. Danny moved towards the board while I assessed my own condition. I wasn’t as drained as I had been. If I looked for it, past the very loud currents of life energy flowing through Danny’s body, I could _just_ feel the familiar thrum of my own ectoplasm. It was quiet, but it was there. Maybe enough to do something, although I didn’t know what; flee, or turn invisible, if we were lucky.

Reaching out a hand, Danny picked up a little white marking stick, and turned to face the board. He actually put his _back_ to the big human, which seemed like a terrible idea to me. Maybe it was different for humans, but I doubted it – not when they couldn’t even turn their heads all the way around.

Tense silence descended throughout the lair. Danny was thinking furiously. Planning? His eyes scanned the symbol in front of him.

 _I don’t suppose you know the answer?_ he asked, as if it were his last, desperate hope.

 _The answer to what?_ I wondered.

He let out a heavier-than-normal breath.

_The equation! Haven’t you been paying attention?_

‘Equation’… I didn’t know that word. I’d heard the big human saying it a few times, though, so I was pretty sure it had something to do with the symbols Danny was looking at.

 _…I think…_ I tried, and Danny stopped taking in breaths for a moment. _I think that one’s a nine!_ I finally declared, happily, focusing on the looping symbol with the circle on top.

Danny breathed again.

 _No, that’s an eight,_ he replied, dejected. Then he raised his hand, and scratched some new symbols onto the board. I waited for the fight to come, even as Danny’s fear became something more like resignation, and he slumped back towards his chair.

 _If I was going to get stuck with a ghost in my head, why couldn’t it have been a genius ghost?_ Danny griped.

The big human turned to the class.

“Now, who can tell me what Mr. Fenton did wrong?” she asked.

A bunch of humans stuck their arms in the air. Danny slumped lower down into his seat, and I waited, and waited, but nothing bad seemed to happen until the weird sound blared again, and all the smaller humans hurried out of the room.

If nothing else, I was beginning to piece together that the loud noise meant ‘change places’, or something like it.

The rest of the day was like that. At the middle, Danny took a break to eat again – which delighted me – and ‘apologized’ to Sam, restoring their alliance by acquiescing to her somehow. I admit, I wasn’t really paying attention. The delicious taste of ‘peanut butter’ distracted me. Especially when it got stuck to the top of Danny’s mouth, which was a very unique sensation. After the break for ‘lunch’ was done, Danny went back to the little locked door where he’d put his bag.

One of the bigger humans – the one with the red jacket – was waiting there for him.

“Hey, Fentorino,” he said, as Danny filled up with apprehension again. Tentatively, I got ready to act, too, though I was less inclined the second time around; Danny seemed to react very oddly to things sometimes.

Red-Jacket lifted one hand, and smacked it against the tiny door. Danny jumped.

“It’s your fault I got into detention. You know what that means. I’m gonna enjoy pounding you into next Thursday!”

Panic flooded through me.

 _He has temporal abilities?!_ I wondered, balking. In the Ghost Zone, those were only a rumour!

 _No, he doesn’t, he just has fists,_ Danny thought back, momentarily more exasperated than afraid. Then Red-Jacket grabbed Danny by the front of his shirt, and slammed him back against the tiny doors. It hurt, especially with the injuries on his back – which _still_ hadn’t completely healed, even though it had been a long time since he got them.

“How’s it my fault that you decided to throw paper at me?” Danny replied. Then he let loose a yelp, ducking down as Red-Jacket raised one of his hands, curled it, and started hitting him with it. That hurt a lot, too. I wondered why Danny wasn’t doing anything to fight back. Was Red-Jacket really that strong? The situation hadn’t seemed so dire a moment before, but as the pain stacked up, I adjusted my assessment accordingly.

I gathered my energy again, and decided I would try to make us both intangible. But before I got far, Red-Jacket lifted Danny up, and then stuffed him into the small compartment behind the tiny door. It wasn’t easy. Danny’s body didn’t really fit, and everything was very solid, with no give or flexibility. The corners of his limbs jammed against the edges of the walls, and Red-Jacket slammed the door shut with a sneer.

“Let’s see you weasel your way out of _that_ , loser!” he called from the other side of the door.

There were a few seconds of silence. Then, the sound of footsteps moving away. I could scarcely believe our luck. No ghost I had ever known would shove his opponent into some lair and just _leave!_ Not unless he was the one who was trying to get away.

 _That was lucky,_ I thought.

 _…You are so weird,_ Danny replied. Then he let out a heavy breath, and shifted himself so that he could kick at the tiny door in front of us. He called out – which I thought was a bad idea, since Red-Jacket might decide to come back and do something really bad, but Danny seemed set on it. After a few minutes without any kind of response, he stopped to take a break. His back hurt.

The wailing clang sounded through the air again.

_I’m gonna miss class…_

I didn’t ask what he meant. I just recognized the sorrow in his tone. My energy was still close at hand. Maybe…

 _Danny?_ I asked, tentatively.

_Yeah?_

_I could try and get us out._

Danny paused, and I could tell he was thinking. So I stayed quiet for a while.

 _Would that work?_ he finally wondered at me. _Last time we were in the Ghost Zone._

 _I don’t know,_ I admitted.

There was another pause. Danny tried kicking and shouting some more, but he only succeeded in giving the little door a small dent, which seemed to distress him. Again, he took his bottom lip between his teeth. It was very dark, and his limbs were starting to ache along with his back.

 _I don’t want that freaky thing to happen with my hair and eyes again,_ he told me.

I had no idea what he meant. But when I asked, he just shook his head. Then he seemed to brace himself, even though he didn’t really move much. I could make out just the faintest hint of excitement running through him.

 _Okay,_ he agreed, _go for it._

It worked differently than it had the first time.

The first time, I didn’t need to reach for my energy. It was just there. But ever since I had slept – or done something like sleeping – it had been further away. Still there. Just quiet, and low down. When I reached for it in the tiny room, there was a lot more resistance. I had to focus, and I felt like something was fighting me every inch of the way. Danny’s stomach filled with a strange churning sensation. His skin tingled, and his usual warmth began to ebb away.

Just when I was sure he would tell me to stop, there was a flash of light, and it felt like something snapped into place. Abruptly, my energy was as close at hand as it had been in the lair of the sleeping king. I wasted no time in making us both insubstantial, and drifted through the tiny door in front of us.

The corridor beyond was empty.

_Stop!_

I let go, startled by the sudden fluctuations of relief and panic that came from Danny. As soon as I did, his feet hit the floor, and his solidity returned. He looked down at himself, patting his body, which was no longer wearing the clothes he’d changed into that morning, but the black and white outfit that I had first seen him in. Only, with the black and white reversed. Fear overtook him, and he whirled around, staring hard at the smooth surface of one of the nearby tiny doors.

The reflection that stared back had stark white hair and glowing green eyes.

_I thought I told you not to do that!_

_I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to!_ I replied, his fear feeding into my own sudden panic. What had I done? What if he got so mad that he had his parents destroy me?

_Change me back! Quick, before someone sees!_

_I’ll try, I’ll try!_

I focused, but for a few seconds, I wasn’t exactly sure what I should be focusing _on_. My power was everywhere. Trying to drag it back just made Danny intangible, or invisible. Trying to shrink myself didn’t work. The only thing I could think of was the sinking sensation I’d endured before I slept the last time, only that wasn’t something I wanted to repeat. It was very hard to concentrate, too, when I had to deal with my own panic as well as Danny’s incredibly potent, ever-increasing alarm.

 _What are you doing?_ Danny demanded. _Just – put it back to the way it was before!_

 _I’m trying! I don’t know how!_ I admitted.

_Oh man…_

I really was trying, but I was also stopping just short of doing the one thing that probably would have worked. Not because I didn’t want it to work – I desperately did – but because I was afraid that I might fall asleep again. And that I might not wake up from it. But sleeping inside some human was still probably better than being completely destroyed, so, as Danny’s emotions built up, I finally gave it one last ditch effort and _forced_ myself down.

The world blinked out for a moment, and everything turned green. Then a light flashed again. Immediately, I felt too hot and heavy, trapped and disoriented, like an energized net had just been thrown over me. Danny staggered and pressed his palm against one of the little doors. He gulped in big breaths of air while his stomach churned, and then stared at his reflection. Relief washed through him at the sight of his original clothes, and his black hair, and his blue eyes.

 _Back to normal,_ he thought. _Let’s not do that again._

I felt very worn-out by the effort I’d made. There was quiet for several breaths. Then something like a thought nudged at me, gently.

 _Um… Ghost? Are you still there?_ Danny asked.

 _Yes,_ I managed to reply. _Just… tired…_

His mouth curled down into a frown, and a feeling I didn’t quite recognize passed through him.

 _Thanks for getting me out of the locker,_ he said.

 _What is a ‘locker’?_ I wondered, before I could stop myself.

Danny laughed out loud. His stomach settled down, and some of the tingling spreading through both of us began to fade. Straightening up, he patted the tiny door that he’d been leaning on. I was just glad that I couldn’t feel any annoyance or anger from him.

 _These are lockers,_ he told me. Then he shook his head a bit. _Anyway, we have to get to class._

Danny moved quickly, then, and though the big human in the next lair we entered gave him a displeased look, there was no real trouble after that. I tried to pay attention to what he said, but it was hard to focus on anything outside of myself for a while. I wondered if I had put some pieces back wrong. Or if there was even a right place for them to go. It was all stuck and jumbled together, after all.

Eventually, the last ringing noise sounded out, and Danny left the big building and headed back to the path that led to his parents’ lair.

As he walked, he stuffed his hands into the open compartments of his pants, and stared at the ground. I didn’t mind. It was almost as interesting to watch the second time around as it had been the first.

 _There’s gotta be a way to fix this,_ he thought – the first thought he had directed at me since the ‘locker’ incident.

 _I don’t know how,_ I admitted, bracing myself for some kind of backlash.

But Danny only sucked in a huge mouthful of air and then let it out again. I got the impression that he was thinking; it was a low murmur of words too quiet for me to hear. But I didn’t intrude. Instead I left him to himself, as much as it was possible for me to do that, and focused on the colours passing beneath his feet, and the heavy weight of his steps as he took each one.

 

 


End file.
